An Antidote to Aliases

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After years of our enduring the cryptic constraints of DOS-style filenames, the long-filename support introduced with Windows 95 is a welcome relief. You can now name a report First-Quarter Earnings.doc instead of 1STQTRER.DOC. But if you boot from a start-up disk or restart your system in DOS mode, the descriptive long filenames are replaced by odd-looking "aliases" that conform to DOS filename constraints. Your report file will appear as FIRSTQ~1.DOC.

This occurs because Windows 95, with its supporting cast of virtual device drivers, isn't loaded. Without these drivers--particularly the installable file system manager (IFSMgr), which contains the heart of the system's long-filename support--long filenames appear not to exist. They're still on the disk, but DOS knows nothing about them and ignores their existence.

Ordinarily, you'll have no reason to boot to DOS and look at your hard disk. But it may be the only way to access and retrieve files from a hard disk that's going south. There are few things more frustrating than being unable to see long filenames when you urgently need to make copies of critical files. This issue's utility, LFNDir, is a command line program that lets you view long filenames under DOS. The syntax and output for LFNDir closely match those of the DOS DIR command when DIR is executed from within a Windows 95 DOS box. You'll still need to use the alias to copy or delete a file, but at least you'll know which alias corresponds to the file you're after!